We tried to integrate ODK’s Signature widget into CHT.
But it doesn’t seem to be working. Instead of signing one has the possibility to upload a file. Is there an alternative? Is this signature widget not yet supported by CHT or are we doing something wrong?
Hi, I checked with @jkuester who had been working on the upcoming Enketo upgrade, and the CHT could support that widget but doesn’t currently. Since we hadn’t had any requests for the signature widget, to optimize the app bundle size we omitted the drawing functionality it needed.
That said, it’s now clearly useful for you, so I’ve moved this conversation to the Product > Feature Requests category, and we can move forward from here. In the meantime, it would help to hear more about where and how you would use this feature. Could you describe the users and workflows in this thread?
@marc Thanks for the reply! We need to obtain the participants’ permission before they fill out a form. By doing so, the paticipants confirm their agreement to participate in a study by signing the form.
Hi @marc - This is a feature that we require as well. A CHW present a consent form to household members and then get a signature for consent before continuing collecting further data. Has there been any work done on this yet or is it in a future pipeline
Now that the upgrade to Enekto 5.x is complete and stable, I think we should revisit adding this widget! I have logged a GitHub issue to track this:
If my memory serves me correctly, the main reason this widget was not included when we did the Enekto uplift was because it added quite a bit of code to the webapp bundle and the extra memory requirements did not seem worth it when we did not have much interest in the feature.
One thing to consider about this widget, though, is that the signatures will be stored as image attachments. Storing an extra image attachment for a significant percentage of reports could have a dramatic impact on DB size.
If an actual signature image is not a hard requirement, it might be worth exploring other ways of capturing consent (e.g. via a trigger question).
Thank you for opening the github issue.
That’s a compelling reason for the widget being excluded during that time.
For interest sake, how much of an impact did the widget make on memory?
Thank you for the heads up regarding the db size impact!
Luckily for us we only need to do that once for each household assigned to each CHW - so it “should” not have too much of an impact.
We do plan on also including an individual level consent for each household member, but that would only be next year some time.
The trigger question suggestion does satisfy our use case, unfortunately, our stakeholders insists on capturing a signature.
So we definitely have an interest in this feature being included.
I cannot find the exact numbers that I had recorded, but if I recall correctly it was somewhere in the ~50kB range. Nothing too crazy, but more than just a few lines of code…
@robinmurphy @cht_user we had some additional clarifying questions raised by @Jennifer_Quesada on the GitHub Issue and I was hoping maybe you could provide some more details (either here or on the GitHub issue).
How do they know that the signature is the user’s real one? Someone can draw a dot and submit it. Will they require CHWs to submit their ID picture before the project starts to compare signatures?
a. If the signature is wrong, what happens with the data collected in the form - because we still don’t have a tool to verify if the drawing is just a line or a dot
Would a picture of the CHW holding a paper with a signature + date be more accurate or enough? Many people find it challenging to sign using a phone. And we already support image uploads.
